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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or you’re just not that into video gaming culture, you’re probably aware that PAX recently came to Melbourne, Australia. For the benefit of the rock dwellers, PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a massive convention celebrating the gaming culture and community, talking about a lot of gaming issues good and bad, and showing off a lot of cool new games and technology. More info about PAXAus is available on the aptly named PAXAus website.

There were plenty of great things about the convention, but the best story I can think of to explain the spirit of the event happened on the second day in the Queue room (named for the great Prof. Waitington Queue, inventor of the social phenomenon known as ‘queuing’). Continue reading →

Built this last weekend as a side project to help with one of my bigger projects, it will allow you to log in with GitHub and build yourself a nice little shortlist (“Sprint” in AGILE/SCRUM terms) of tasks. It’s basically a TODO list you can quickly build based on your GitHub Issues.

Core functionality is there but I will be adding a few little bits and pieces to make it prettier and more functional.

My home office got an upgrade today with the addition of a new “Standing” desk. In a nutshell, the idea is that standing up while you’re working on a computer can prevent many of the common ailments that plague a geek, or any office worker type really. There’s claims that you can also burn more calories than sitting all day, which helps offset the mocha’s I love so much, and also I’m hoping to build more strength in my dodgy knee I pwned at kung-fu training a while back. I see the standing desk phenomenon in the same kind of light that I see any hippie-quick-fix type thing and that is to take it with a grain of salt, but I wanted to give it a really good go before I passed any judgement. People say it works for them, maybe I’ll like it… Continue reading →

Hey hey, I’m still here, just busy as usual. I’ve got another quick little Google gadget that I wrote to keep track of links that I want to check out but don’t have time when I find them to give them any justice. Since I always have a Gmail window open regardless of being home or at work I wanted something that was persistent across both, and in my face enough for me to remember to click on them.

True to style, I didn’t look for one that already existed, where’s the fun in that? I wrote one myself that works for me!

Essentially, Quickmark is a very cut down version of a task list that builds a list of whatever you’ve typed in the textbox below. It can be just little text strings, or if it starts with “http” it will treat it as a link when it displays in the list. To remove an item, click the “X” on the left of it.

As with most Google gadgets, it will save persistent data to your Google profile so it’s private but safe and will persist across computers. The only thing with this one though is that it uses TWO SEPARATE LISTS if you install it on both iGoogle and Gmail – one set of data for each domain. I call it a feature, because iGoogle will allow much bigger lists anyway and you don’t want them being squished into the gmail sidebar.

To add it to iGoogle and try it out, click this thing:

If you want it to show up on the Gmail sidebar you’ll need to enable the “Gadgets from URL” Labs feature, then add this URL as a gadget:http://quickmark-gadget.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/quickmark.xml

Last week I launched a little side project I’ve been working on for months. It’s called Stack Planner (dot com!) and it’s a one-at-a-time task tracking system designed with my own brain and thought process in mind. I figure if I would find it useful, others would too! Continue reading →